Hello! I'm the maker of the AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES speedrun.com entry, moderator of the largest Uchikoshi/AI Discord discord.gg/somnium, and partner of the Danganronpa/Zero Escape speedrun moderators! I'd be happy to help moderate the entry and add new categories. A fellow member from the Discord, Luna, would also be a fantastic moderator as she has already begun documenting several routes and skips. We haven't made the entry yet because there is a streaming ban on most of the game until July 15th, so out of courtesy, we were waiting to upload our full public runs until then.

For starters, I think PC should be split from consoles, which suffer from a lot of loading time lag. Second, I'd suggest making categories like we have for the AI entry, including Maximum Time Remaining for Somnia, Evaluation%, and specific other endings.

I'd love to help and would appreciate the opportunity to make the AINI speedrun page even better!

Hi mimzy. It's great to hear that this game is getting more traction. Since I'm not really familiar with the site and all I think it would be best to leave it into your care if you do not mind. I'm really interested to see where this game goes and excited to jump back into it once a better route and more defined categories have been established!

Hi there, thanks for having me as a mod!

I've gone through and set a bunch of things up, but there are a few sticking points I want to get clarified.

With Maximum Time Remaining, I see that for AITSF a slightly unconventional way of recording times is used and I don't understand all the nuances, so I'd like to leave it to mimzy to set that up as they have experience with the category from AITSF.

A new wrinkle there is difficulty - while I support allowing Story Difficulty for real-time and full-game runs, I think it makes sense to enforce Standard Difficulty for MTR to incentivise time management. Do others agree?

There's call for an Evaluation/Achievement/100% category, but it's got some quirks I'm not currently sure how to handle in the rules. In particular, some achievements are tied to things in the bonus menu, outside of an individual save, e.g. the Bonus Somnium. Would time still start when you start a new game? When would timing end?

Finally, do we want to allow submitting an Any% for Credits, and counting the time they first reach the credits, as long as the runner splits appropriately? Or should it have to be a distinct run that ends there.

I agree with Standard difficulty being enforced for MTR. Another thing to consider would be the fps for PC runs - I am doing runs at 60fps, vsync ON in options - and I don't know what happens if you unlock it, it might become the case where the player with better PC will be able to skip the text and scenes faster. This needs a proper test, especially since nearly all of Team Zero Escape games on PC are extremely notorious in that regard when it comes to speedruns.

(As a general note I did run the game but because I was also a reviewer I can't upload any footage [thus cannot submit a run] past a certain Somnium until July 16th. I am definitely not breaking a signed NDA just to upload my runs early LOL but I've been doing my own semi-casual stuff too I'm not just out of nowhere.)

I'm going to be making the following changes overall:

1. Force V-Sync on PC, because I am pretty sure many people can't really play on higher FPS.
2. Add the Maximum Time Remaining in Somnia category with pretty much the same rules as AI1. The only additional rule is that it will be Standard Somnium difficulty only. I don't think Investigation difficulty matters though.
3. Consoles cannot reset their Evaluation list without hacking, so the main 100% category I'll be adding is really Appendix%.
4. Since you can delete your system file on PC, I'll add an exclusive Evaluation+Appendix% category for those who wish to run that. But, it will be a small subcategory since it's pretty inaccessible to run.
5. Any% for the game will be made into Credit% (probably Komeji/Shoma ending).
6. The main running category will be Resolution+Diverge%, and timing will end on either the start of the fade to black for the Resolution credits if you do that 2nd or Diverge ending if you do that 2nd.
7. This game suffers extremely with load times on all consoles. It would be ideal if we could find a way to consistently remove load times. There's a lot less AI-sight load so I imagine it will be Easier, but probably still not Easy. Unfortunately I don't have much experience with splits or removing loads in general. I am unsure how I'd go about it reasonably considering runs are over an hour long and have like, 100+ instances of loading. If you all have advice I'd love it. Until then, I'm just going to be separating PC and all consoles, as I've heard the loading issue is present for everyone.
8. For AI1, I allowed people to submit their final in-game save time as their run time and take a picture. This was mostly for console players, especially Switch, who have no way to record the game; since we were a tiny community and there's no real stakes. However, now I think it would be good to suspect test where in-game time will give an advantage; I'll do my own testing but I'd appreciate y'alls input if you're comfortable saving for a few runs. Tentatively, I won't allow it yet, especially since console players probably won't want to do a manual save anyway considering it will delete their main save. Augh. One save slot and no refreshing system really smarts.

I probably won't get all this done immediately but the streaming embargo doesn't lift until July 15th anyway so I'm probably good to at least get everything done before then. I appreciate all your runs, input, and enthusiasm!

I think it would make sense for the enforced Vsync rule to show FPS as well, just the simple Steam overlay display. Would be easier for verification purposes too.

Also, has anyone heard of any loading times problems on PC? It has been smooth for me so far, they are practically non-existent and consistent.